The emergence of the social media age has been able to keep people more well connected than ever before, but it can also be trouble some for others. A complete stranger who you’ve never met before from Spain is able to add you as a friend on Facebook. If you accept his request, he is able to know you full name, the city you live in, birthday, religious and political views, place of work, hobbies, interests, and the list goes on. They’re even able to peruse through your photo albums, and the albums you’ve been tagged from your friends, to find out what hang out spots you like to go to.

It’s sites like Facebook, even LinkedIn, that allows other people to get to know you, without having a conversation with you. Although that sounds like a creepy thought, you’re easily able to be stalked by someone, what’s worse is you’re more susceptible to scammers.

“The scammer can take that information and then look you up on LinkedIn and Twitter to find out your personal website, job, position, average income, number of years employed, education level and parlay all that information into a ‘cash scam.’

Fraudsters are using this information to set up “boiler rooms” and contact people on this master list. Boilers rooms look to employ high pressure sales tactics to push unwanted, over priced, or sometimes non-existent stock to unsuspecting buyers. Boiler rooms are nothing new, but using Facebook to gather leads and target people is becoming a serious problem.”

Take this as a note of caution. Add people to your friends list who you trust, or only share certain information with people who are questionable, by putting them on limited profile access.

Before Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook decided to change the site’s settings, I had purposefully made my profile super private so that no one was able to search for me, and I would have to add people for us to be Facebook friends. Unfortunately, for some reason Mark no longer wanted the site to remain that way, probably for Homeland Security reasons. But privacy is definitely dead, and everyone should be aware and cautious with what information they want the public to see.